The Martyr’s Cup

The Early Christians Give Us the Signs of the Christian Life:
Broken Bread & Lives Poured Out

by Mike Aquilina

In July of A.D. 64, during the tenth year of Nero’s reign, a great fire
consumed much of the city of Rome. The fire raged out of control for seven days—and
then it started again, mysteriously, a day later. Many in Rome knew that Nero
had been eager to do some urban redevelopment. He had a plan that included an
opulent golden palace for himself. The problem was that so many buildings were
standing in his way—many of them teeming wooden tenements housing Rome’s
poor and working class.

Convenient Fire

The fire seemed too convenient for Nero’s purposes—and his delight
in watching the blaze didn’t relieve anybody’s suspicions. If he
didn’t exactly fiddle while Rome burned, he at least recited his poems.
Nero needed a scapegoat, and an upstart religious cult, Jewish in origin and
with foreign associations, served his purposes well. Nero, who was a perverse
expert at human torment, had some of its members tortured till they were so mad
they would confess to any crime. Once they had confessed, he had others arrested.

He must have known, however, that the charges would not hold up. So he condemned
them not for arson, or treason, or conspiracy, but for “hatred of humanity.”

To amuse the people, he arranged for their execution to be a spectacle, entertainment
on a grand scale. The Roman historian Tacitus (who had contempt for the religion,
but greater contempt for Nero) describes in gruesome detail the tortures that
took place amid a party in Nero’s gardens.

Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins
of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses,
or were doomed
to the flames. These served to illuminate the night when daylight failed.
Nero had thrown open the gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a
show in the
circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or
drove about in a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme
and exemplary
punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed,
for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were
being punished.

That is all we know about the first Roman martyrs. We know none of their names.
Tacitus doesn’t tell us why they were willing to die this way rather than
renounce their faith. Yet this should be an important question for us to consider.
Why did the martyrs do this? What prepared them to face death so bravely? To
what exactly did they bear witness with their death?

Let us begin with the witness we know best and ask ourselves: How can we spot
a Christian today? What are the unmistakable signs that tell us we’re with
a fellow believer?

Christian Signs

In the first generation of the Church, there were several unmistakable signs.
St. Luke tells us that the first Christians, one and all, “devoted themselves
to the teaching of the apostles and to the communion ( koinonia), to the
breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The teaching of
the apostles, the communion, the breaking of the bread, and the prayers.

This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about those first
Christians as we would like to know. They were a small group, not especially
wealthy, without social or political status, and often operating underground.
What’s more, over the next 275 years, imperial and local governments tried
fairly regularly to wipe out all traces of Christianity—destroying not
only the Christians’ bodies, but their books and their possessions as well.
So what we have left are the handful of documents that survived—mostly
sermons, letters, and liturgies—as well as a few other scraps of parchment
or painted wood, and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved
for us.

Yet what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the archeological
digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in one
small detail: The first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostolic
teaching, to the communion, and to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.” One
phrase especially—the breaking of the bread—recurs in many of the
scraps we have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the Eucharistic
Liturgy, the Lord’s Supper.

Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and that is
perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be Christians. No Christian
practice is so well attested from those early years. No doctrine is so systematically
worked out as the doctrine of the Eucharist.

It was when they gathered for the Eucharist that all this—their common
life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the apostles—happened
most clearly, directly, intensely. They experienced fellowship with each other
and together heard the apostles’ teaching, and they broke the bread in
the accustomed way, as they said the customary prayers.

So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its unity
in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.

A Eucharist Everywhere

Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman Empire. One modern sociologist
estimates that, in the centuries that concern us here, the Church grew at a rate
of forty percent per decade. By the middle of the fourth century, there were
33 million Christians in an empire of 60 million people.

That meant that the Eucharist was celebrated everywhere. And the fact that it
was celebrated everywhere was itself a favorite theme of the earliest church
fathers. Justin the Martyr commented in the Dialogue with Trypho that,
by the year 150, “There is not one single race of men . . . among whom
prayers and Eucharist are not offered through the name of the crucified Jesus.”

The ancient Fathers commonly applied the Old Testament prophecy of Malachi to
the liturgy: “from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great
among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure
offering.” Those lines found their way into many Eucharistic prayers, where
they remain even to this day. (They appear, for example, in the third Eucharistic
prayer in the Roman Missal: “so that from east to west a perfect offering
may be made to the glory of your name.”)

As the Church moved outward from Jerusalem, this is what believers did. They
offered the Eucharist. The early histories tell us that the first thing the Apostle
Jude did when he established the Church in the city of Edessa was to ordain priests
and to teach them to celebrate the Eucharist.

This is what the early Church was about. Everything that was good in Christian
life flowed naturally and supernaturally from that one great Eucharistic reality:
from the Christians’ sacramental experience of fellowship and communion,
of the teaching of the apostles, of the breaking of the bread, and of the prayers.

Real Martyrdom

But there was another dominant reality in the ancient Church. It is something
that appears just as often in the archeological record and in the paper trail
of the early Christians. That something is martyrdom. Persecution.

Martyrdom occupied the attention of the first Christians because it was always
a real possibility. Shortly after Christianity arrived in the city of Rome, the
emperor Nero discovered that Christians could provide an almost unlimited supply
of victims for his circus spectacles. The emperors needed to keep the people
amused, and one way to do so was by giving them spectacularly violent and bloody
entertainments.

The Christians’ morality made them none too popular with their neighbors
anyway, so the citizens were more than willing to cheer as the Christians were
doused with pitch and set on fire, or sent into the ring to battle hungry wild
animals or armed gladiators. It was all in a day’s fun in ancient Rome.
Over time, Nero’s perverted whims settled into laws and legal precedents,
as later emperors issued further rulings on the Christian problem. Outside the
law, mob violence against Christians was fairly common and rarely punished.

The Christians applied a certain term to their co-religionists who were made
victims of persecution. They called them “martyrs”—which means,
literally, witnesses in a court of law. And to the martyrs they accorded a reverence
matched only by their reverence for the Eucharist.

In fact, the early Christians used the same language to describe martyrdom as
they used to describe the Eucharist. We see this in the New Testament Book of
Revelation, when John describes his vision of heaven. There, he saw “under
the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the
witness they had borne.” There, under the altar of sacrifice, were the
martyrs, the witnesses.

That image brings it all together. For, in those first generations of the Church,
the most common phrase used to describe the Eucharist was “the sacrifice.” Both
the Didache and St. Ignatius refer to it as “ the sacrifice.” And
yet martyrdom, too, was the sacrifice.

God’s Wheat
Ground

And so, in A.D. 107, when Ignatius described his own impending execution, he
imagined it in Eucharistic terms. He said he was like the wine at the offertory.
He wrote to the Romans: “Grant me nothing more than that I be poured out
to God, while an altar is still ready.” Later in the same letter he wrote: “Let
me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God’s
wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” Ignatius
is bread, and he is wine; his martyrdom is a sacrifice. It is, in a sense, a
eucharist.

Ignatius’s good friend Polycarp also died a martyr’s death. Polycarp
was bishop of Smyrna, and had been converted by the Apostle John himself. His
secretary described the bishop’s martyrdom, once again, as a kind of eucharist.
Polycarp’s final words are a long prayer of thanksgiving that echoes the
great eucharistic prayers of the ancient world and today. It includes an invocation
of the Holy Spirit, a doxology of the Trinity, and a great Amen at the end.

When the flames reached the body of the old bishop, his secretary tells us that
the pyre gave off not the odor of burning flesh but the aroma of baking bread.
In yet another martyrdom, then, we find a pure offering of bread—a eucharist.

The Eucharistic images in Ignatius and Polycarp echo again in the future writings
and histories of the martyrs. Even in the court transcripts, presumably taken
down by pagan Romans, the Christians reply to the charges against them with lines
from the liturgy. They lift up their hearts. And when they are sentenced, they
say Deo gratias—thanks be to God.

The story of the martyr Pionius proceeds in the words, verbatim, of the eucharistic
prayer: “and looking up to heaven he gave thanks to God.” The Greek
word for “thanks” there is eucharistesas. So we might read
it as, “Looking up to heaven, he offered the Eucharist to God,” even
as the flames consumed him. In a similar way, the priest Irenaeus cried out,
in the midst of torture, “With my endurance I am even now offering sacrifice
to my God to whom I have always offered sacrifice.”

So pervasive is this eucharistic language in the early Church’s account
of martyrdom that one of the great scholars of Christian antiquity, Robin Darling
Young of Notre Dame, has spoken of the ancient Church having two liturgies: the
private liturgy of the Eucharist and the public liturgy of martyrdom.

Loving Eucharist

But what is it about martyrdom that makes it like the Eucharist? Well, what has
Jesus done in the Eucharist? He has given himself to us, and he has held nothing
back. He gives us his body, blood, soul, and divinity. He gives himself to us
as food. And that is love: the total gift of self. That is the very love the
martyrs wanted to emulate. Jesus had given himself entirely for them. They wanted
to give themselves entirely for him—everything they had, holding nothing
back. If Jesus would become bread for them, they would allow the lions to make
them finest wheat for Jesus.

So: Martyrdom was a total gift of self. The Eucharist was a total gift of self.
In the Eucharist, Jesus gave himself to us. In martyrdom, we give ourselves back
to him.

But there’s a problem here. Very few of the ancient Christians died for
the faith. What about the rest? What was their gift? How did they live the Eucharist?

Not long after Christianity was legalized by Constantine, St. Jerome noted that
some believers were already growing nostalgic for the good old days of the martyrs.
But Jerome stopped such fantasies in their tracks. He told his congregation, “Let’s
not think that there is martyrdom only in the shedding of blood. There is
always martyrdom.”

There is always martyrdom. For most of the early Christians, the martyrdom
came not with lions or fire or the rack or the sword. It came not at the hands
of a mob or a gladiator. For most of the early Christians, “martyrdom” consisted
in a daily dying to self in imitation of Jesus Christ.

Jesus told them: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself .
. . daily.” So the Christians denied themselves, in imitation of Jesus.
What did this mean, in practical terms? It meant that they would never eat lavishly
as long as others were going hungry. They would never keep an opulent wardrobe
while others dressed in rags. They would never hold back their testimony
to the faith as long as any of their neighbors were living in
sin or in ignorance of the love of Jesus Christ.

Whatever they had, these Christians gave. They gave of themselves—just
as the martyrs gave themselves in the arena—just as Jesus Christ gave himself
on the Cross—and just as Jesus Christ gave himself in the Eucharist.

In Christ, these Christians had come into a Holy Communion. In baptism, they
were baptized into his death, into Christ’s own martyrdom. In the Eucharist,
they became one with him, in the deepest, and closest, and most intimate bond
possible. They were closer to Jesus than they were to their best friends, closer
to him than they were to their spouses. They were closer to Jesus than they were
to their own parents or their own children. He himself had promised them that
they would live in him, and he would live in them.

This was, and is, the deepest truth of the faith. In Jesus Christ, we
live as sons and daughters of the eternal Father—we share his own divine
life. In Jesus Christ, we can call God our Father because God is eternally
his Father. In the New Testament, St. Peter puts our Holy Communion in the most
powerful terms: We have become partakers of the divine nature.

The Life the Martyrs Knew

And what is that nature? How does God live in eternity? What is the Trinity for
us, besides a theological abstraction and a mathematical enigma?

John said it all: God is Love. God is self-giving, life-giving love. From all
eternity, God the Father pours himself out in love for the Son. He holds nothing
back. The Son returns that love to the Father with everything he has. He holds
nothing back. And (as the Western tradition has understood it) the love that
they share is the Holy Spirit.

This is the life the martyrs knew even at the moment of their death—
especially at the moment of their death. But they themselves had been caught
up into that life so long before and so many times. They themselves had been
caught up into the life-giving love of Jesus Christ—the life-giving love
of the Blessed Trinity—whenever they had gone to the Eucharist. Whenever
they had received Holy Communion. Whenever they had joined with their brothers
and sisters for the teaching of the apostles and the communion, the breaking
of the bread and the prayers.

Jesus gave himself entirely to them, and they gave themselves in return. At every
Eucharist, he gives himself entirely to us, and we give ourselves entirely in
return. We say Amen—So be it!—I accept. And when we do that, we consent
to the communion.

We need to know what we’re doing when we say “Amen.” The life
of Christ is more than a warm, fuzzy feeling that everything (including me) is
okay and everything (no matter what I do) will work out fine. It’s accepting
his cross. It’s accepting our martyrdom. And in the words of Garrison Keillor:
If you don’t want to go to Minneapolis, what are you doing on the train?

There is always martyrdom. St. Paul had signaled this in his Letter
to the Romans, where he wrote: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the
mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable
to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Surely Paul’s words reached
many future martyrs in Rome, where he himself would one day die by beheading.

But his words reached many others as well, men and women whose sacrifice would
be something quiet and hidden and noticed only by God. It is the same St. Paul
who referred to our bodies as “temples of the Holy Spirit.” Let’s
not ever forget that, in the ancient world, temples were not mere shrines; they
were places of sacrifice.

And so are we. Our bodies are places of sacrifice, and our lives are the offering
on the altar. We ourselves are the Eucharist in motion.

The Look of Love

Our everyday life should be a voluntary sacrifice, voluntary self-giving, voluntary
martyrdom. Listen to the traditional language about penance and reparation, mortification,
fasting, pilgrimage, and almsgiving. It’s all about self-possession, self-denial,
self-mastery. And all that is great. It is good to be disciplined, and self-denial
is a means to achieving discipline. But discipline, too, is a means and not an
end in itself. Why do we want to possess ourselves?

Jesus shows us why. We possess ourselves in order to give ourselves away—just
like Jesus, just like the martyrs. Only then can we become truly ourselves. For
we are made in God’s image, and God is life-giving love, whose human life
was a self-giving sacrifice. The Eucharist is that sacrifice, and all our lives
must be placed upon the altar, all our lives must be taken up into the Eucharist.

Remember the question I asked earlier: How can we spot a Christian today? The
same way we could have spotted them on the streets of first-century Rome: by
their Eucharistic lives. When we give ourselves without holding back, we are
living like the early Christians. We are living like the martyrs. We are living
like the Most Blessed Trinity in heaven.

St. Irenaeus put it well, around the year A.D. 190: “Our way of thinking
is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.”

What does it look like in the day-to-day? It looks like a mother staying up all
night with a sick child—or a grandmother up late with the child so that
her daughter can get some sleep. It looks like a husband working overtime at
a job he doesn’t particularly enjoy, so that his family can know a better
life. It looks like a family keeping vigil by a deathbed. It looks like the dying
man who musters a smile for his loved ones.

It looks like the young couple who give up life in suburbia to head off to the
mission field. It looks like the religious sister who has renounced family and
liberty in order to give herself entirely to Jesus Christ and his Church. It
looks like a pastor, who must serve as father and teacher and psychologist and
sage and business manager—and can’t find enough hours in the day.

That’s the total gift of self. It’s what the early Christians knew.
And it’s what we must come to know for ourselves, if we want to become
ourselves—if we want to become what God made us to be. There’s no
other way to be happy. It’s all there in the Mass of the early Christians,
and in the Eucharist we attend on Sunday, the Eucharist we live every day of
our lives.

“The Martyr’s Cup” first appeared in the March 2006 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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